The financial services industry relies heavily on reports and reporting services/systems as an important medium for communicating with clients and potential clients. A report is an organized collection of data formatted for viewing or printing in a user-friendly way. A report might communicate time critical information about investments, including a fund/portfolio performance, present market value, a summary of gains/losses, and other information.
The typical challenge faced by designers of large scale enterprise reporting systems in the financial services industry is trying to integrate a mixture of commercial vendor applications with home grown applications so that reporting can be done in flexible and scalable ways. Some of the challenges report designers face relate to licensing and scalability. Other hurdles report designers face within the environment of large enterprises, is data access and retrieval.
In large-enterprise environments, where databases are securely protected by data services applications, vendor report design applications cannot carry out a direct query of the enterprise databases, as their access to such databases is restricted. The protected data needed by the user must then be retrieved from the protected databases through a separate process, often involving Information Technology (IT) specialist(s) within the enterprises, and must then be delivered to the report design application of choice. One of the possible ways to retrieve the data is for the IT specialist(s) to build a data warehouse at certain time intervals (e.g. daily) that is accessible to the report design application. However, the creation and maintenance of the data warehouse needed for this solution involves a high cost. Moreover, the data that is accessible to the user is never current, as it is limited by the time period that is chosen to create the warehouse. For example, in the case that the database is run overnight, the data will always be one day old. This is not in line with the demands of users in an enterprise environment, who usually need to create reports on up-to-date data. A second option the IT specialist(s) have is to retrieve data from enterprise databases through third party applications, and to then deliver the data to the reporting application. In some of these third party applications, the data retrieval is done in real-time, through complex in-memory data joins, by keeping the data in virtual tables in memory. Such multi-application, multi-vendor approaches can be expensive, inflexible, and difficult to administer and maintain. In addition, existing third party applications do not often have the maturity, stability, speed and flexibility sufficient to effectively retrieve the data for delivery to the report design application. Thus, alternative solutions are needed in order to respond to the demands of users in large enterprise environments.
One alternative that has been developed in response to these needs is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/119,008 “A workflow based and metadata driven reporting system,” and it is hereby incorporated by reference. This patent application describes a system that allows generation of reports by retrieving the data through a controller. A user is then allowed to select one of a defined set of report design templates and schedule an ad-hoc or batch run of the report. If the report templates do not match the needs of the user, changes to the report templates can be made through an administration application, which will then update the report database that the user taps into.
Report design users are increasingly requesting a closer involvement in the report design process and higher flexibility of the design application. First, users are requesting a shorter turn-around time in producing a new report. The available vendor solutions for creating a new report often have a long turn-around time, which can extend to even days. The first reason for this long turn-around time is that the involvement of IT specialist(s) is needed at many stages of the report production. Typically, the IT specialist(s) first meet with users in order to gather the requirements conveyed by the user. Then, the IT specialist(s) need to analyze the data sources to find out if all data points are available. Next, the IT specialist(s) need to implement a new data extracting process in order to make missing data points available. Report design vendor applications cannot readily integrate the necessary data in the instance complex linkage of data records from the enterprise databases is necessary. The IT specialist(s) may also need to create a new report template, which may additionally involve the collaboration with a different specialized IT team. Next, the IT specialist(s) will need to add the new report in the current reporting system. In addition, the IT specialist(s) will need to verify that the new report is produced as required. Lastly, the IT specialist(s) will need to communicate back with users about the availability. This process may iterate a few times if any issue or error is identified, and each iteration increases the turn-around time. The turn-around time affects the client take-on process directly. When a new client requires a specific report on specific data, and the business cannot deliver it in a timely fashion, the client may turn to other companies.
The second limitation is the cost involved in the data source technology that the current vendor solutions in the reporting space require. The current vendor solutions require that the data be consolidated in one place which is usually known as a data warehouse. Building a data warehouse is not only expensive, but also time consuming. A typical data warehouse would take a few months to design and to implement. A data warehouse would also require huge data storage. The cost incurred in maintaining such data storage is also high, and not all reporting requirements can justify such cost. Implementing this solution represents a waste of resources.
Another limitation of the current systems is that only canned scheduled reports are supported. This is due to the fact that in order to have IT staff support a system, formal documentation and appropriate training is usually required. Also required is budgeting and resource planning These factors limit the type of reports that IT can support Usually monthly reports can be supported. Ad hoc and portfolio manager reports are hard to support because they have too many variables. Ad hoc and portfolio manager reports are usually supported in a case by case situation, hence incurring in a higher cost.
Accordingly, an improved system is needed. The system of the invention, DART, is designed to address all the user requirements described above, i.e. shorter turn-around time, increased available data points, increased report formats and more direct control on the report production process by the user, without requiring involvement of IT specialist(s).